ARCON: An Undisputed Market Leader with Robust Risk Control Solutions

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Anil Bhandari | Chief Mentor | ARCON

With an aim to address the emerging enterprise risk issues and provide a systemic solution to various technology risks besides providing a unified governance framework, ARCON was established in the year 2006. Today, it is a leading information technology company specialized in risk control solutions. But this is not how it all started.

Anil Bhandari who is the Chief Mentor of ARCON used to work with his team on large IT consulting projects encompassing banking, telecom, and insurance industry among other verticals. Having closely worked with enterprises of all shapes and sizes, it was obvious that data security topped the IT head’s things to work on. Moreover, from compliance point of view, it was becoming increasingly critical for global organizations to have a robust mechanism in place to control, manage and monitor access to highly sensitive corporate data.

His experience showed that Privileged Access Management would become pivotal in the overall IT security framework. So, in 2006, he founded the company in London with R&D facilities in Mumbai to start an inspiring journey. The company since then has come a long way. Today, it employs 250+ employees and has a clientele list of 1000+ global enterprises from various industries that trust ARCON to protect their data assets and help them fulfil Governance, Risk Management and Compliance requirements.

A Best-Fit Architecture

ARCON primarily is a product company. The company’s robust stack of products typically helps organizations to administer, govern, and conduct analytics on identities (Human and non-human) that interact with systems across the enterprise. Some of its products are:

  • ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) enables IT security team to manage, monitor and control administrative access to privileged accounts.
  • ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) helps organizations to provide end-users a rule and role-based access to critical applications and flags any deviation from baselines activities in near real-time basis.
  • ARCON | Security Compliance Management (SCM) is a tool which helps in continuous risk assessment for critical technology platforms. It governs, assesses, responds, monitors and optimizes Information Risk Management.

Offering wise, ARCON has a best-fit architecture. Whether a customer requires to install software in-prem servers, or wants to access applications through on-cloud data centres, ARCON provides both options. Moreover, many small to midsize operators find merit in its SaaS offering due to lower IT operational expenses.

Integration wise, ARCON offers a largest connector framework which helps in customizing the IT projects. Its solutions seamlessly integrate with disparate technologies that includes IAM, Authentication, and Ticketing tools including telecom nodes.

And finally, functionality-wise, ARCON offers unique set of solutions that are required to address day-to-day enterprise use-case. For instance, password management, session monitoring and reporting are some of the core requirements of privileged access management.

Exemplifying Thought Leadership

A clever mind behind the inception of ARCON, Anil Bhandari is an inspired innovator, technologist and thought leader in Information Risk Management. A Chartered Accountant by profession, Anil’s area of interest always has been Enterprise-wide Risk Management.

Anil started his career as a management consultant, serving in many sectors which ranged from engineering to commodities and from healthcare to IT/ITES. Besides, he also led several M&A and Due Diligence teams on behalf of clients spanning several industry verticals, especially in the EU region.

Thanks to his in-depth experience of assessing risks for data centres, networks, varied technology platforms and core IT processes, Anil possesses intensive knowledge in the Information Security and GRC domains. The knowledge acquired over the years has helped him to consult large enterprises looking to implement cutting edge solutions in Cyber Security and the best practices for critical functions such as BCP/DR.

He has persistently contributed to several associations and forums and has been a part of various national and international committees that focus on technology risk management and internal audit.

Having contributed as an honorary advisor to regulators on matters pertaining to risk and compliance, Anil is now internationally regarded as a thought leader in the Information Risk Management, Internal Audits, Regulatory Compliances, Frauds, Forensic, and IT/Cyber Security space.

Anil has been serving as a Chief Mentor since the Company was founded in 2006. In ARCON, he mentors a large team of techies for product innovation and technology roadmap. Discussions and strategizing with the development team to build robust risk control solutions that mitigate Information Security related challenges emerging in the digital sphere dominates his packed work schedule.

Determining ‘When’ ‘Who’ ‘How’ and ‘What’ of Digital identities

ARCON’s robust risk-predictive PAM solution offers organizations comprehensive visibility over IT infrastructure. In the backdrop of spiralling and segmentation of digital identities, Insider threats, Third-party risks and Targeted attacks have become some of the most feared IT disruptions. All these malefactors target privileged accounts—gateway to confidential information; to misuse or abuse data. Attack on these highly elevated accounts has a potential to bring down the entire IT infrastructure. Hence, a robust security of privileged accounts is a must for today’s organization. ARCON Privileged Access Management solution enables organization to reinforce security around privileged accounts through a host of features and functionalities. Essentially, the solution helps IT security staff to track and secure, govern and control and record and audit all the underlying privileged accounts in the IT setup. The process helps in determining ‘When’ ‘Who’ ‘How’ and ‘What’ of digital identities. This in turn enables the security team to detect and mitigate risks emanating from privileged users

Leveraging AI and ML to Deliver Top-notch Solutions

ARCON has spent significant resources towards incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) into its stack of security products in the last three years. The reason being that the IT security dynamics have evolved gradually during the course of the time. Today’s enterprise IT setup demands risk-predictive capabilities to combat malicious corporate insiders’ and risky end-users’ behavioural profile threats. It is a shift from a conventional IT security approach of protecting and preventing threats.

Take for example the endpoints. Most of the insider threats and corporate frauds happen when at an enterprise level, the security and risk management teams fail to find the anomalies in end-users’ behaviour patterns. If these behavioural anomalies remain undetected, data misuse or abuse can happen at scale.

To counter this humungous IT challenge, ARCON developed User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) tool. ARCON UBA works on an outcome-based model wherein ML assists in learning processes. Endpoints learn by experience whilst observing end-users’ patterns which in turn helps in deciphering anomalies on real-time basis.

Likewise, ARCON developed one robust analytics tool and a reporting tool, Knight Analytics and Spection, respectively, that use AI and ML for better decision-making in an enterprise Privileged Access Management (PAM) environment. Knight Analytics essentially leverages AI and ML to detect and predict risks based on historic logged data from PAM. The tool prepares a risk-based scores of privileged profiles based on clustered login data. Spection enables IT risk management team to discover, interpret, and communicate with meaningful patterns in data with the help of Machine learning. It also helps in effective decision making through understanding data patterns.

An Opportunistic Approach

The Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly has led to significant reductions in IT spending due to macroeconomic downturn. Having said that, the crisis has also created an opportunity for IT security companies. With remote working becoming the ‘New Normal’ in work environment and challenges surfacing due to it, the pandemic crisis has offered an opportunity to the industry to demonstrate how organization’s IT process can remain resilient in the tough times. For ARCON, it offered an opportunity to showcase to the world that how ARCON | PAM can address remote access control challenges by offering VPN-less approach along with granular access control and multi-factor authentication to secure systems and ensure compliance.

According to ARCON, the demand for PAM technology would continue to remain robust as global enterprises look to comply with IT security mandates that specifically requires identity governance. The company’s estimates suggest that the market would witness a Y-O-Y growth between 30% and 35% for the next three years. Technology wise it foresees that market would look to deploy Single-Sign-On tool, a functionality that offers one-time administrative access to systems, more often due to changing work dynamics. Likewise, ARCON does anticipate that customers would expect PAM technology to integrate with SIEM and SOC. It also foresees a convergence of IAM technologies with PAM to deliver a full-fledged identity federation tool, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA).

Striving to Increase its Footprints

An aggressive geographical expansion is ARCON’s priority in the near future. Having been undisputed market leader in India and the Middle East region for over 10 years now, the company is witnessing strong growth in the APAC, Africa and European region for the last three years. The company has also reinforced its presence in the North American region since the beginning of 2021. Now, it would double its efforts in terms of sales and marketing in these regions to increase footprint whist its ever-expanding global partner ecosystem has allowed the company to penetrate the Western markets. Having won some strategically important accounts in the Western markets in the last two years, ARCON would look to consolidate its presence in these markets.